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Comment by kovacs_x | Hacker News Reader

The eSim's are available these days so you don't have to wait for new SIM to arrive... if your provider & phone supports this feature.

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Don't eSIMs have an even worse failure mode? If the phone itself dies then there's no SIM for you to take out and put into a new phone immediately right? As I understand it you have to first find another phone (with a working line!) to call your provider with, hope that it's within their business hours, and wait on hold for who knows how long, until you finally get it set up? Because of course you don't have anything urgent you need to take care of in the meantime while you wait for your carrier to give you back the keys to your digital life right?

Phone companies don't let you apply for replacement esim through a website?

Maybe some do? I've seen ones that don't.

With Vodafone, I just login on the website and swap the esim. It’s ridiculously straight forward and you can set a sim pin that works across devices so even if someone were to steal the login and try to take your esim, they still need the pin to unlock the sim on the device.

That's better than what I've seen, but that still requires you to find a second phone with existing service? Everyone has 2 spare phones with 1 additional line of service lying around right? Or a computer with internet service I guess.

With a normal SIM all you need is the device you're going to put it into. And a needle/paperclip...

Obviously, you need a second phone to put the sim or esim in. It doesn’t necessarily need service though.

You just need an internet connection to get the QR code for the esim (though I have a paper version I can scan as well). The beauty is I don’t have to swim to the bottom of a lake to get the original phone to get the original sim. I can just scan the piece of paper and put my pin into the new phone. Though I think no matter what, I would have to go online to give the IMEID so the phone will successfully activate.

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